DO NOT WANT (2005)

About

One of the most basic image macros, DO NOT WANT (and its inverse, “DO WANT”) is an internets standard reply to anything that is put forth as undesirable.

Origin

While living in Shanghai, China, blogger Jeremy Winterson bought a bootleg DVD of Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith. The DVD contained poorly translated English subtitles. The Title of the Film is translated as Star War The Backstroke of the West.
Winterson found the Engrish to be hilarious, and posted a series of photos taken of his TV, and posted them to his blog.

By June 17th, BoingBoing.com’s Xeni Jardin posted about it on the popular linkblog in a post entitled Engrish hilarity on badly bootlegged Star Wars DVD, and Winterson’s discovery soon rose to viral attention.

Although the blog contained such absurd translations like “Jedi Council” becoming “The Presbyterian Church,” “the force” becoming “the wish power,” and many inexplicable mentions of elephants, the screen-shot that became a meme, was the final image posted on the blog; in which Darth Vader’s scream of “NOOOOOO!” is translated to “DO NOT WANT.”

On January 27th, 2009, Winterson posted an updated version of the classic blog entry with proper screen grabs and more examples.

Spread

The following terms were compared in a Google Insights for Search analysis.

• “backstroke of the west”
• “do not want”
  While “do not want” preceeds “backstroke of the west,” this is because the phrase often appears within other gramatically correct sentences. But following Winterson’s blog post, the trend for “do not want” shows a noticeable increase.

Corollaries

In terms of syntax, the meme could almost be thought of as an expansion of This Is Relevant to My Interests — once the subject presented has been brought forth, DO NOT WANT can be used as a social cue to others as to whether the material is, in fact, worth viewing.

See also

• This Is Relevant to My Interests